Tutorials – Dorico

Tip: Create custom beat groupings

Make a selection in the music and press Shift+M to open the Time Signatures/Meters popover You can also double-click a time signature or select one and press Enter to edit it.
Type your desired beat grouping inside square brackets in the popover, and press Enter.
You can hide any meters that only set new beat groupings using the Hide time signature property in the properties panel.

Press Space to start and stop playback. Playback will start from the current position of the playhead.
Use Shift+Space to play from the previous start position.
Shift+Alt+Space will start playback from the beginning of the flow.
Make a selection then press P to start playback from that rhythmic position.
Make a selection on more than one staff and press P to play just those staves.
Press Alt+P to move the playhead to the current selection.
You may wish to turn on visibility of the playhead even when playback has stopped. You can do this on the Play page of Preferences.

It’s easy to change any instrument in your project, even when it has existing music already input.
In Setup mode, expand the player card for the instrument in question, and hover over the instrument label to show the menu arrow.
Click the arrow to open the instrument’s menu and choose Change Instrument.
The instrument picker opens, allowing you to browse for the instrument you require. Use the search box to filter the list.
With the correct instrument selected, press Change and the instrument is replaced. All music is retained, with any necessary transpositions handled automatically.

1. By default, Dorico has mouse input enabled, meaning you can select a note in the Notes panel and click in the score to enter music.
2. While this can be very useful—and many people choose to work this way—some prefer to input notes using either a MIDI keyboard or their computer keyboard.
3. Of course, you can input using a keyboard with mouse input still enabled. However, you can run the risk of clicking in score by mistake and entering notes you didn’t mean; and you have to disable note input before selecting other items in the score.
4. When you enable Select, clicking on the score does not input notes. And when you click on another music item (notes, rests, dynamics, tempo and so on) it is selected, and note input exited.
5. If you like this way of working, you can make it the default behaviour on the Note Input and Editing page of Preferences.

1. The default font used for text in Dorico is Academico. This is the font that will be used by all paragraph styles that inherit from the default font, and also for text components of music items, such as tempo markings and playing techniques.
2. You can choose which font will be used for these type of text objects. Open Preferences and at the top of the General page, set the Default text font family. Apply the setting and close the dialog.
3. The new text font will be applied to any new projects you create. Setting the font family in Preferences will not affect existing projects.